Analysis of pesticide residues in hops and their extraction by liquid CO2 during the production of hop extracts.

A method has been developed for analysing pesticide residues in whole hops, hop pellets and hop extracts by GC-MS. Five batches of hop pellets containing nine different pesticides (triadimefon, dicofol, mephosfolan, bupirimate, cyhalothrin, tetradifon, endosulfan, pyrazophos and total bisdithiocarbamates) were extracted with liquid CO2. Pesticide concentrations in the original hop pellets and the extracts were determined. The pesticides were concentrated by the extraction process (concentration factor 1.3-8.3), except for the bisdithiocarbamates, which were not extracted. When the same amount of bitterness was added into the brewing process using liquid CO2 extract as opposed to hop pellets, for most of the pesticides proportionately less pesticide was added. However, for two pesticides (dicofol and triadimefon) corrected residue levels were similar to, or in some cases slightly higher than, those in hop pellets.